Abstract
The authors present a comparative analysis of the Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations (2005) and the Québec quatercentenary celebrations (2008) informed by critical race theory, cultural studies, and studies of commemoration as overarching frameworks of analysis. This collaborative work considers two sites rarely analyzed together and examines how these major commemorative events narrate and represent relations among settlers and Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan and in Québec. The analysis focuses on two significant events in each commemorative celebration: the Centennial Gala in Saskatchewan and Rencontres [Encounters] in Québec. While the contexts and narratives differ in significant ways, the two commemorations reveal their mutual investments in a national settler project. The authors contend that examining how Canada as a nation is remembered and currently imagined through such disparate sites and local histories provides critical insight into ongoing contentions about its constitution as a White settler society.
Introduction
This study offers a comparative analysis of the Saskatchewan Centennial (2005) and the Québec 400 (2008); our analysis is informed by critical race theory and studies of commemoration and public memory. This collaborative work is drawn from our separate studies (Caldwell, 2013; Leroux, 2010) and shared experiences examining national commemoration in Canada. The focus of this essay is on significant events in each provincial commemorative celebration: in Saskatchewan, a televised Gala and also a traveling play; and in Québec, a high-profile public spectacle. We have been guided in our comparative account by a commitment to uncover ways that the Saskatchewan Centennial and Québec 400 narrate historical and contemporary relations between White settlers and Indigenous peoples.
A major purpose of commemoration is to address and produce a given (national) population through a variety of practices such as monumentalization, spectacle, and narrative (Spillman, 1997). Theoretical material on subject-making is useful to explain the workings of commemoration, providing tools to explain which “people” are the imagined audience of and participants in commemoration. Along with many others engaged in critical studies of Canada (e.g. Dhamoon, 2009; Thobani, 2007), our analysis draws on such material to investigate the making of dominant national subjects and stories. We do not make claims based on the experience of particular participants at specific events. Rather, our work questions the narrations and performances themselves for who they imagine and call into being. This is a question that we recognize as a critical one in anticipation of 2017, which will mark the 150th year of Canada as a nation. Examining how two places as distinct as Saskatchewan and Québec are remembered and currently imagined as Canadian spaces provides critical insight into ongoing contentions about the constitution of Canada as a White settler society.
Studies of Canadian commemoration, in particular Eva Mackey’s (2002) account of Canada 125 commemorations in 1992 have explained how such events interpellate their audience as a collective unitary subject. Mackey (2002) reveals how a “new form of ‘populism’ and new definitions of ‘the people’” gained legitimacy in Canada during the Canada 125 commemorations (p. 107). Ultimately, Mackey demonstrates how “concepts of the nation and community as non-political and natural ‘people’ draw on notions of ‘civil society’ and ‘the popular’ fundamental to Western modernity and the development of ‘the nation’” (p. 140). Our analysis examines such calls to “people” as the imagined audience and/or as remembered subjects in our sites and investigates how contemporary fractures and exclusions (see Agamben, 2000) are embedded in idealized notions of the people of Québec, of Saskatchewan, and of Canada. Most critically, we are concerned with how the naturalization and depoliticization of the collective subject of commemorative address requires that narratives and displays actively suppress daily political and social realities, in particular of racialized and Indigenous peoples (see Leung, 2006).
We explore how these two commemorative sites construct ideal subject positions that provide a set of possibilities for individuals. Ideal subject positions are positions that are produced and lauded as normal or standard, and that provide certain groups of individuals with a “natural” and comfortable sense of belonging through commemoration. The various discourses and performances that commemorate the Saskatchewan Centennial and the Québec 400 construct subject positions or possibilities through their accounts of White settlers and Indigenous peoples. Tensions and ambiguities exist among the various discourses circulating about these events, and these ruptures can be felt through the analysis in the upcoming pages.
On commemoration: the Saskatchewan Centennial and the Québec 400
The 2005 Saskatchewan Centennial marked the 100th anniversary of Saskatchewan’s official inauguration as a province. During that year, many communities organized “homecomings”; the Lieutenant Governor hosted a televised gala of performing arts; Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip visited the province; the provincial Western Development Museum (WDM) launched a series of exhibits; and newspapers published special editions featuring images and stories about and from Saskatchewan’s past, among dozens of other events in the province throughout the year.
The theme chosen for the Saskatchewan commemorations was “100 Years of Heart”; ubiquitously represented throughout the celebrations as a “symbolic ‘arms wide open’ figure [that] represents numerous positive emotions, events and activities: everything from a huge homecoming hug, to multicultural dancers, to a heartfelt exclamation of joy and celebration.” (Saskatchewan Centennial, 2005). Further elaboration of its symbolism includes ample evidence of an ideal Saskatchewan subject:
We are seen the world over as a people of great heart; home to some of the friendliest and most caring and giving folk you will find anywhere. We are the birthplace of medicare. We lead the nation in volunteerism … We hold family near and dear to our hearts. Saskatchewan is often referred to as Canada’s heartland and the “heart of the west.” (Saskatchewan Centennial, 2004)
During the Centennial year, commemorative narrations came to represent Saskatchewan as the beating heart at the center of the Canadian body politic.
Over 3000 km away and 3 years later, the Québec 400 celebrations took place throughout 2008 across Québec, but particularly in Québec City. The commemoration marked Samuel de Champlain’s landfall on the shores of Québec City in the summer of 1608. There were some controversies in the lead up to 2008 about what precisely Champlain “founded” (Lavallée, 2010), but in the end the Québec 400 decided on marking the foundation of French civilization in the Americas. The Société 400 also chose a general theme for the celebrations. Organized under the rencontres [encounters] banner, the celebrations highlighted the numerous encounters among peoples that have taken place in Québec and Québec City, with particular focus on the early contact period. The theme manifested itself continuously throughout the Québec 400 at minor and major events. The most salient representation of the encounters logic during the events was in the main event, Rencontres, which took place directly adjacent to the Québec National Assembly on three occasions between 3 and 5 July.
Separated through time and space, the Saskatchewan and Québec festivities nonetheless converge in many ways. In the sections that follow, we present three ways that the two separate commemorations reveal their mutual investments in a national settler project: (a) through the temporal displacement of Indigenous peoples in their narrations, (b) through constructing dominant White settler subjects of the commemorative address, and (c) through the example of Indigenous peoples resisting each of their differing settler-colonial frames.
“Once upon a time …”: Indigenous peoples in the past
Rencontres: “meeting” in the contact zone
Champlain played an inordinate role as the central historical figure in the Québec 400, 1 particularly as the narrator of the harmonious relationship between Indigenous peoples and French settlers at the onset of French settlement. Manifesting an unquestioned French genius for cultural sensitivity and diplomacy, Champlain’s story was no longer primarily of the talented cartographer and ship captain who discovered Québec. Instead, we are introduced to the new Champlain: confidently Québécois, tolerant of differences, unfazed by change (see Leroux, 2010; Salée, 2010).
Champlain is the main character of Rencontres, which is a fanciful re-telling of 400 years of “Québec” history through his eyes. The show begins with Champlain high above the assembled crowd, perched at the top of the National Assembly building: he is a bronze statue surveying his surroundings. As the music begins, Champlain rids himself of a bronze-colored mask and matching overcoat, signaling to the audience that he has come alive. Champlain’s opening statement sets the stage for the romantic and nostalgic tone of the event:
Québec. My beautiful. My sweet. My city. Four hundred years ago on this day, regardless of what historians might say, I, Samuel de Champlain, founded you in the name of his Royal Highness Henry IV and made of your vast wilderness, the first lady of New France!
The most relevant segment of the spectacle begins only seconds after Champlain is lowered to the ground. He leads a group of performers into a makeshift stream, spilling from the majestic Fontaine de Tourny to the main stage. Champlain continues, “Québec, you made yourself so beautiful for our meeting. Do you see that beautiful river, just like a poem … look at you Québec, as beautiful as when you were born.” Champlain then gestures wildly toward the shoreline: “Hey … what do you see over there? … Along the shorelines, among the trees, are strange shapes. Are they giant birds? Or beasts?” After a long pause, he answers his seemingly rhetorical question with flourish: “No! Not birds, nor beasts. Such a surprising vision: men, women, and children, feathers in their hair. We thought we were alone in the New World, but they came to meet us.”
Moments later, Champlain climbs onto the stage. He tells the story of his first encounters with Indigenous peoples, who, in his account, taught the French to survive in the harsh, unfamiliar climate. He explains, while staring intently into the eyes of well-known Québec-based Innu musician Florent Vollant:
The first encounters were fragile. But little by little, we found friendship. We were hungry and they fed us. We were cold and they showed us how to dress. We were suffering, and they showed us how to boil bark, or to smoke grasses.
Champlain then places his hand on Vollant’s shoulder in friendship. The low, rhythmic sound of drums fills the stage, as Vollant, along with his band, play a drum-infused, Innu-language folk song, “Nikana,” around a burning campfire. Champlain steps back and looks on encouragingly.
As soon as the slow, lilting song ends and a new upbeat one begins in the background, Champlain says, “Between us is produced a type of alchemy and the embrace between the Aboriginal [Amérindien] and European gives us a new species … the Québécois!” The crowd cheers for the first time since Champlain’s opening descent and the sounds of French-Canadian music reverberate loudly, featuring a prominent accordion and fiddle. With the pounding beat carrying the crowd, Champlain explains that in the early settlement period he inaugurated an “Order of good cheer” that stipulated that at “all times and all places we must celebrate our presence in New France.” Champlain dances joyously, as barefoot background singers wearing French-Canadian sashes move to the music.
This scene, lasting approximately 15 minutes, was the highest profile representation of the “meeting” of French settlers and Indigenous peoples in 2008. It starkly delineated the temporal frame provided for Indigenous peoples, since at no point other than the immediate contact period did Indigenous peoples appear explicitly on stage either at Rencontres or at any other major commemorative event. Much as in the Saskatchewan Centennial, Indigenous peoples appear to belong in a distant past, which is a potent narrative at a time when Indigenous material claims have taken on much more significance in the legal, political, and social realms. One of the specific narrative strategies used in the Québec 400 involved reclaiming the encounter among Indigenous peoples and the French as one that produced an entirely new “people”: the Québécois.
Patrice Groulx’s work on historical representations of the “Iroquois enemy” thoroughly documents the changing fate of Indigenous peoples in French-Canadian/Québécois historiography. Analyzing nearly 250 published narratives on the Battle of Long Sault (circa 1660), Groulx (1998) demonstrates how “the symbolic image of Indigenous peoples relies on deep structures [of meaning] and intervenes in the making of Québécois identity” (p. 13, our translation). While the animus for Groulx’s study—to explain the hostility the Québécois currently express in regards to Indigenous political and land claims—is certainly still warranted, the representations of these historical relations have shifted noticeably in the two decades since his study. No longer simply expressing intransigence vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples, Québécois historical representations are rehabilitating the past. In the case of Rencontres, the Indigenous Other is incorporated into the Québécois subject. There is no visible Indigenous resistance in this account; instead we are invited into a story of the creation of one people. Indeed, our analysis in this study suggests that Indigenous peoples may have assimilated the settler population to their own cultural, political, and economic systems (see also Gaudry, 2013). Not only does violence in the contact zone (and its aftermath) disappear, but Indigenous peoples find themselves on equal footing.
In reformulating the encounter between early French settlers and Indigenous peoples, the Québec 400 introduces us to the new Québécois subject. After all, according to this narrative, all French Québécois are Indigenous and all Indigenous peoples are Québécois. In contrast, the Saskatchewan Centennial narratives repeat a construct of successive inhabitants of the space, whose contemporary relations are celebrated as reconciliatory, such as in the refrain “we are many and we are one” in the official Centennial anthem. However, the reconciliatory refrains of the Centennial also work to claim the central Saskatchewan subject as the European settler, and the practices of Centennial commemoration do not hold up the continuing, developing, political, and varied stories of Indigenous peoples. While the Québécois subject may emerge as an appropriation of indigeneity, the Saskatchewan subject seems to proceed from a somehow “peaceful,” and past, displacement.
Centennial cheer: Indigenous peoples out of time
Contrary to the Québec 400, the Saskatchewan Centennial had no equivalent singular large-scale spectacle re-enacting history for public consumption. Rather, there was repeated emphasis on smaller-scale, community-led events. Rationales for this decentralized style often came in the form of reiterating Saskatchewan as distinct in character from its larger neighbor, Alberta, also marking a centennial year in 2005. The investment in community-based celebrations throughout the Centennial year was integral to the commemorative narrative. Yet, in its very resistance to assert a “big project” or centrally managed story, there remained insistent claims to a knowable and collective character of Saskatchewan as a place and people. Such claims relied on and repeated a storyline framed by European presence and time.
The first of a series of three newspaper inserts distributed by the Saskatchewan Centennial office prior to and during the 2005 commemorations included a message from the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan that marked the temporal frame for the province’s European settler presence:
Once upon a time, there was a land inhabited by indigenous peoples. For thousands of years, their traditional ways had sustained them. With the arrival of newcomers, agreements were made to live in peaceful co-existence. Because of this, more immigrants came but the harsh realities of the prairie resulted in six out of every ten people leaving. Who stayed behind? They were the dreamers, the builders, the tough, the determined, and the resourceful, as well as those who had chosen to share this space with them. They were your ancestors and mine. Our province’s 100th birthday is the perfect time to celebrate HOPE, COURAGE, FAITH, and GENEROSITY. These characteristics define our citizens past and present. It is a time to rejoice. It is a time to pay tribute to our home … our Saskatchewan. (Haverstock, 2004, emphasis in original)
These comments provide several clues as to the specific temporal frame utilized to outline settler experiences in a land that was “once” inhabited by Indigenous peoples, a clear relegation of Indigenous peoples to the past that mirrors the central narrative in Rencontres.
Similar to the newspaper insert, one choreographed scene in the Centennial Gala depicted a fusion of cultures and peoples in a way that markedly situated Indigenous peoples outside of the contemporary frame. The scene was introduced as communities and traditions flowing together in a manner similar to different rivers joining up. The Great Plains Dance Troupe (GPDT), Indigenous dancers, opened the scene on a stage framed by moveable stage pieces meant to resemble grain elevators and stretched animal skins. Also on stage were an orchestra and choir, silo-styled seating areas for the stage band, and a blue painted river on the stage floor. Dancers who appeared on stage throughout the Gala to move the elevator/animal hide pieces around, dance accompaniments to some performances, and dance transitions between performances were poised at the edges of the stage as the GPDT danced. For several minutes, the stage was filled with the Indigenous dance troupe and a drum circle sharing dances and songs.
At the sound of fingers gliding on a harp—a sound strongly associated with magical disappearances—the GPDT dancers moved off the stage accompanied by audience applause, as the Gala dancers appeared and moved themselves and the stage pieces to a mounting crescendo of music. The rest of this scene featured a row of step, ballet, and Ukrainian dancers. These were not sequential performances, but choreographed together. At the end of the dance, the stage filled with dancers who had come and gone during the scene—the step dancers, the Ukrainian dancers, the Gala dancers. The piece concluded with the stage full of smiling performers, a climax of music, and thunderous audience applause. Notably, the Indigenous dancers who exited at the sound of the harp were not among the dancers on stage at the end of the scene.
The “magic wand” sound of the harp as a transition between the GPDT and the choreographed segment that followed strikingly emphasized the departure of a visible Indigenous presence from the stage. That the climax, or finale, to the scene did not include a return of the GPDT marked their departure even more vividly. Visually, this scene represented indigeneity as sequentially prior to and separate from the interweaving of the cultural and expressive forms choreographed as a coming together of communities in Saskatchewan.
The temporal frame constructed in the Centennial, such as in the two examples above, functioned to mark and differentiate forms of belonging. The 1905 date commemorated in the Centennial attached Saskatchewan to a linear chronology and marked Saskatchewan as a continuing social reality. Constructions of time and space that purport to have displaced Indigenous life rely on an understanding of displacement as somehow accomplished and irreversible. Marcia Crosby (1989), discussing Indigenous art and cultural production in Canada, writes,
The portrayal of indigenous people as victims, contaminated by European culture and dying rather than changing, has benefitted those who have participated in its construction. This is not to say that aboriginal cultures did not go through dramatic changes that were violently imposed on our communities. However, we did not all die. We are still here—altered forever, and without the “authenticity” that some, nostalgically, would like to impose. Neither have we all been successfully assimilated into Euro-Canadian culture. (p. 270)
The “once upon a time” invocation and magic harp of the Centennial resonate with the shift in music that marks the moment in Rencontres when Champlain announces the “Order of good cheer” to the uplifting sounds of accordion and fiddle. In each of these scenes, linear transitions supported by musical shifts in pace and tone portray Indigenous peoples as “out of time.”
It is this trope that acts as the organizing principle of the commemorative events, however it may fade into the background of these joyous celebrations. It is notable that Rencontres and the dance scene from the Centennial Gala imply that “authentic” Indigenous peoples belong in the past, or at least, prior to European settlement. The ideal Québécois subject, much as its Saskatchewan equivalent, is thus constructed as belonging in the present through its temporal progression. In other words, Euro-settlers are “in time.”
Indigenous peoples, according to these frames, do not belong in the present as Indigenous peoples, bringing the assimilative logic of nearly 150 years of the Indian Act to the fore (see Palmater, 2014). The implication is that not only do White settlers move through time, but Indigenous peoples are stuck in the past, forever relegated to a time of mythical authenticity. According to the Lieutenant Governor’s message, it is precisely the settlers’ determination to move through time—struggling against the harsh prairie seasonal climate—that marks one as “of Saskatchewan.”
The disappearance motif of these commemorative performances coexists with contemporary and continuous Indigenous presence. In Rencontres, the disappearance of Indigenous peoples is more complicated than it seems at first glance, since indigeneity continues into the present through the reconstituted figure of the Québécois. The Québécois, formerly a Euro-settler subject, becomes Indigenous, a bold narrative move that was not on display in Saskatchewan, where the division between White settlers and Indigenous peoples appeared to be more strictly maintained.
Temporal markers act as boundaries between settler and Indigenous peoples in the major commemorative events we studied. These teleological frames are also implicated in the assumptions about what characterizes the subjects of commemoration in Québec and in Saskatchewan. In the next section, we look more closely at the production of fixed and knowable characteristics related to these subjects.
The subjects of commemoration: constructing characteristics of “the people”
There are specific and detailed characteristics attributed to the subjects of commemorative address in both events. Notably, Champlain as “founder” of Québec and Saskatchewan as “the land” founded as provincial space are characterized in relation to the imagined “people” as reconciliatory, cosmopolitan, and benevolent. In this section, we consider the character of the commemorative subject and the strategies of invention and fiction at work that call these subjects into being.
These two commemorations do not address the same audience, nor do the Saskatchewan and Québécois audiences appear to be imagined as the same “people.” Their distinctiveness as Saskatchewan people and as Québécois is notable in each case. In the Centennial, characteristics attributed to the “we” included in the address outline a clear thread of attachment to the characteristics of builders (pioneers, nation-builders, builders of a province) and rural identity. In this sense, the people of Saskatchewan stand in opposition to Indigenous peoples, since the latter are not associated with the farmers, loggers, miners, and other workers that are at the center of that Saskatchewan narrative. After all, who was cleared off the land by such developments (and by such work/ers) and how these processes of displacement and dispossession continue to operate remain unaccounted for throughout 2005 (see Cardinal and Hildebrand, 2000; Carter, 1993; Daschuk, 2013).
In contrast, the Rencontres spectacle characterizes the Québécois as both benevolent in relations with Indigenous peoples and inheritors of a resilience earned through resistance to violence at the hands of British settlers. The Québécois become Indigenous in these spectacular renditions of the past. In other words, the Québec 400 places violence at the hands of the British at the center of the Québécois historical narrative, thus ensuring that the Québécois can be reimagined as an indigenized and colonized subject. Emerging as they do through narratives of colonial encounter, these two commemorations demonstrate what is at work in the reproduction of White settler subjects in Canada. The distinct Saskatchewan and Québécois characters are produced through forms of collective address that serve to frame the possible subject positions in these spaces, which has implications for historical and contemporary subjects working out relations and responsibilities to each other.
In the Saskatchewan instance, the ascribed attributes of the doggedly independent, cooperative, Saskatchewan subject—who earns these character traits through a particular history of rural labor—stand in as the supposedly shared, unifying, collective, and recognizable subject of the Centennial. Moves toward claiming this as an inclusive subject position, one that purports to accommodate First Nations and Métis peoples, and people of all ethnicities and all labor and migration histories, work to cover over a “biopolitical fracture” of the sort identified by Agamben (2000). These attributes are frequently and plainly linked to experiences of settler agricultural histories, which themselves are more varied than the production of a singularly recognizable subject position attest:
Resources and resourceful people! We, who have occupied this land, are a resilient and innovative people, in many ways forged from the rigors of this land, its geography and climate. From the First Nations peoples, to the Métis, to the immigrants, to the generations born in this land, we have faced adversity and have achieved against the odds of climate, of sometimes drought and cold winters, and of being land-locked in the heart of a continent. (Calvert, 2004)
The normativity of Whiteness in Centennial moments is not reliant on a predominance of White bodies or faces in Centennial production or promotion. Indeed, in official Centennial material, racial diversity among persons was marked and obvious (see Ahmed, 2012, for a critique of the non-performativity of “diversity”).
The “once upon a time” narration, however, evokes a peopled landscape of Saskatchewan, and an explication of who is addressed by this message. The Lieutenant Governor’s words, “They were your ancestors and mine,” figures that narrative in a way that aligns the assumed audience with a Saskatchewan White settler collective identity in a land that is abruptly imagined as only “once” inhabited by Indigenous peoples. The rendering of Indigenous people as “once upon a time” inhabitants and as those “who chose to share the space” with the tough, determined, and resourceful dreamers and builders is a familiar and well-documented element of such settler imaginaries in Canada (Razack, 2002).
In Québec, the subject has a recognizable character reinforced through a “strategy of familiarity” (Leroux, 2010: 11) employed in its commemorative address. The audience is invited through the interplay of repeated and familiar symbols—including the representation of themselves in an epic story of interracial encounter—to see themselves as uniquely crafted to be resilient and exemplars of cultural fusion (Cornellier, 2006). Imagined in such ways, the ideal Québécois subject not only becomes tolerant of cultural differences and adaptable to change but is, in fact, constructed as distinct from other European settlers.
In both Saskatchewan and Québec, the interplay between the twenty-first-century audience and particular remembered/imagined figures from the “founding” stories work to reiterate the characteristics of those receiving the address. This is accomplished through the call itself, the implied relation with the founding figures, and the playful ways that the fiction of the spectacle is acknowledged or made evident. Part of the implication in the style of such commemorative address is that the relationships between historical figures and contemporary subjects are not really questionable. In Rencontres, Champlain comfortably speaks to a contemporary Québécois audience. In Saskatchewan, an actor dressed as Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier (1896–1911) speaks to the people of 2005 about their relationship to Saskatchewan’s designation as a province in 1905.
The uses of recognizable historical figures, such as Champlain and Laurier, secure and reinforce the attributed colonial character of the people. The fiction communicates across time, and its visibility as an imaginative act effectively allows a form of reassurance to the contemporary people taking up the narrative that “we can live with this invention.” Direct communication between Champlain and the crowd at Rencontres is clearly a ruse, as is the likeness of Champlain. The invention at work in that moment of spectacle is not questioned, nor does it become the basis to question other elements of the encounter that are taken for granted—including the attributed characteristics of “the people.” That is, the subjects of commemoration can participate in the guise of a relationship with Champlain, knowing that invention is at work, but also assured that such obvious construction need not disrupt the narrative of who they are (see Taylor, 2007 on colonial scenarios in performance).
The historical personifications imagined to be in communication with the contemporary audience also include non-human sources. For example, in the Centennial Gala, there were various elements of the performance that invoked the buffalo as holding a direct gaze on the present audience. An opening video to the Gala had as its finale a close up image of a buffalo standing in grass; as the music crescendoed, the animal turned in the direction of the camera/viewers and the camera zoomed in on the eye of the buffalo—a direct engagement with the viewers of the spectacle. In other performances, the land, too, appeared to communicate with the Centennial audience, depicted, for example, as a character in the official Centennial play, All My Relations.
The land was personified in the play as “Crazy Rosie,” one who bears witness to changing “seasons” of human inhabitance; Rosie’s message to the 2005 audience was that Saskatchewan is a continuous place of ever-changing stories and people. In that sense, the contemporary White settler subject has a place that does not require any disorientation or reckoning; these identities can be reconciled with some ease into a naturalized story of a changing populace. Rosie (the land itself) is explicitly narrated as reconciliatory; “her” perspective on the encounters among Indigenous peoples and White settlers is to express a desire for them to share in harmony with each other. The contemporary Saskatchewan subject is invited into the reconciliatory story without any call to question the terms of their emplacement as the main characters. The characteristics attributed to the subjects of Centennial commemoration, in the play as in the Lieutenant Governor’s address, were attached to specified roles in the formation of Saskatchewan. Pleas for harmony and/or reconciliation reiterated these fixed subject positions for the contemporary audience.
Just as Rosie conveys a form of direct address, Champlain in Rencontres comes to life from the still figure of a bronze statue to alert the audience that he has always been watching; the character says playfully to the audience “I was there on high, observing, I saw everything, heard everything.” Rather than the changing seasons that Rosie describes for the Saskatchewan audience, Champlain draws on the birth of those he invokes. Re-telling his own voyage up the St. Lawrence, Champlain describes the Québécois he addresses as “beautiful as when you were born.” Later during his voyage, he invites the audience to imagine themselves with him on the River being pulled into “a welcoming embrace.”
In neither of the events are the subjects of commemoration invited nor provided space to examine or give voice to experiences or identities that do not conform to the dominant stories of who they are. Born with Champlain’s arrival, or arriving as one of Crazy Rosie’s new seasons, the settlers have a place and identity in the terms of a larger story through which they are constituted as its contemporary subjects: hard-working, independent, reconciliatory, and innovative in Saskatchewan; benevolent, adaptable, tolerant, and indigenized in Québec.
Resistant narratives: Indigenous peoples speak back
As we have outlined, there was a clear, yet circumscribed Indigenous presence in the Saskatchewan Centennial and Québec 400 celebrations. While Indigenous peoples participated in the celebrations in a number of ways, indigeneity itself stood as both a temporal symbol against which a shift to Euro-modernity could be marked and an Othered body against which to catalog the characteristics of the subjects of commemoration.
Despite the seemingly depoliticized representations of indigeneity on display, Indigenous peoples developed sites of struggle and resistance to the official commemorations in both celebrations. Of course, Indigenous peoples have been struggling against and countering the impacts of colonialism since the earliest European invaders planted their feet in the Americas. While our analysis reveals the specific ways that Indigenous life is “out of time” in the commemorations, actual lived Indigenous experiences and analyses relegate the frames themselves out of order.
Indigenous narratives of the past: from “Contested Histories” to “The Great Dispersal”
The art exhibit titled “Contested Histories,” funded in part through the Saskatchewan Centennial and curated as a collaboration of the Art Gallery of Regina and the Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective, was a collection of installations meant to contest the celebratory frame of the Centennial. The curators’ text to accompany the exhibit states that
it is important that some of our more complex and unresolved stories are not pushed into the background. There were people here before 1905. While we honour those who arrived since then, we ought not forget the costs of those arrivals, or forget about those who were here long before. (Garneau and Rempell, 2005)
All of the installations in the exhibit directly or implicitly de-centered the Centennial as a reference point for Indigenous life and memories. Some of the artist statements named the importance of including “untold history” (Pelletier, 2005) and implicating dominant narratives in exclusionary practices of commemoration. Each of the pieces gave expression to Indigenous stories across time that involve the encounters, disorientations, and violences of colonialism without centering the concerns and interests of settlers in the display or as the assumed audience. For example, Sheila Orr’s (2005) statement about her piece “Framed” indicated that her installation pointed to some of the issues of police violence toward Indigenous peoples, and in the context of the contested histories theme, her statement certainly draws attention to how Indigenous experiences are framed by colonialism. Her piece, as with others in the exhibit, does not invoke a grand narrative of displacement or reconciliation, but rather, frames the presentation of contemporary and remembered experiences through many different Indigenous perspectives.
Another example of a counter-story to the Saskatchewan Centennial was a performance and thesis by Adrian Stimson (2005), “Buffalo Boy’s Heart On: Buffalo Boy’s 100 years of wearing his heart on his sleeve.” Stimson’s work includes direct opposition to the WDM’s Centennial project titled “Winning the Prairie Gamble,” and to the Saskatchewan Centennial theme, “100 Years of Heart.” Stimson’s (2005) performance was titled “Gambling the Prairie Winnings”; in his writing about the project, he describes how he has “re-ordered history through a narrative of prose and double entendre” (p. 23). Stimson describes the creation of a storyboard in which the images include “collected artifacts that are both historical and kitsch, material culture that verifies the presence of the absent” (p. 23). Through these storyboard images, Stimson addresses the “prairie” as colonial narrative, “mimics” that narrative, and “fragments its purpose” (p. 23). The material of colonial narratives, from which the dominant spectacles like the Gala, the WDM exhibits, the Centennial play, and other events draw for displays of a shared though discordant history, appears much less reliably known and shared. In the same way, Stimson’s work challenges the “out of time” Indigenous figure, since it is very much representative of contemporary Indigenous art. Subsequently, Stimson and many of the pieces in the “Contested Histories” exhibit display Indigenous innovation and self-determination, speaking back to the singular construction of White settler-subject characteristics in Saskatchewan.
Wendake, the Huron-Wendat community in the suburbs of Québec City, inaugurated its new Hotel-Museum, a stunning architectural feat, just in time for the Québec 400. The building lies on the shores of the Saint-Charles River, near the Kabir Kouba Falls. The opening and now-permanent exhibit Territoires, mémoires, savoirs [Territories, Memories, Knowledge] narrates approximately 1500 years of Huron-Wendat history. Told from a “Huron-Wendat perspective,” as the introduction to the exhibit explains, the most salient aspect of the exhibit was its direct challenge to the Euro-settler narrative outlined previously. For instance, in the “History” timeline near the entrance to the exhibit, the year 1534, 105 years after the founding of the Wendat Confederacy in 1430, is marked as “The Beginning of the Great Upheavals.” Not much else is said about the date, but it can be no coincidence that 1534 also denotes French sailor Jacques Cartier’s first landing in the St. Lawrence littoral. While Cartier’s voyage did not lead to permanent French settlement, nor did it develop sustained Crown relations with the Huron-Wendat or their allies, the exhibit marks the arrival of the French as irrevocably changing the course of Wendat history.
Georges Sioui (1992, 1999), a Wendat historian, makes similar arguments in his seminal studies of Wendat philosophy and knowledge. In them, Sioui explains the devastating impact of Euro-imperial intervention in Wendat lifeways. Not surprisingly then, the exhibit names 1534 as marking the beginning of the “The Great Dispersal,” denoting a process with no accompanying end-date. The process, presumably European colonialism and settlerism, is ongoing. Nowhere else is this counter-story on display during the Québec 400, where the spectacle presented a teleological representation of the past beginning with European settlement and leading to the development of the great institutions of European modernity, including the nation-state. In the case of Territoires, mémoires, savoirs, the French settlers’ arrival in the St. Lawrence littoral marks a traumatic development, and certainly not one to be celebrated.
Besides disparities in the meaning and marking of the contact period, the exhibit also focuses on recent Wendat resistance to White settler practices of colonialism as a source of Indigenous counter-epistemologies. One of the most prominent examples was a display related to the Supreme Court of Canada’s R. v. Sioui decision in 1990, at the time one of the most important legal decisions recognizing Indigenous territorial rights in Canada. Visitors to the exhibit learn that in 1982, four Sioui brothers (Régent, Konrad, Hugh, and Georges) were charged under the Québec Parks Act for cutting down trees, encamping, and making a fire outside designated areas in Jacques Cartier Provincial Park north of Québec City. Although they lost their initial case, the Supreme Court eventually recognized the Murray Agreement of 1760 as a treaty under the Indian Act, ensuring that the park’s regulations were unenforceable with regard to Wendat uses of the land. The exhibit explains how the decision, brought forth by the Sioui brothers’ dedicated commitment to justice for Indigenous peoples, led several courts in Québec and in Canada to later recognize Conquest-era treaties, also safeguarding Mohawk and Algonquin rights to the land. The Wendat, we learn, are treaty-based legal trailblazers. 2
While these examples of Indigenous resistance in Saskatchewan and Québec are quite different (arts-based, interpretive, and mediated vs document-based, linear, coherent), they share important opposition to the main themes of commemorative address. Decidedly not “out of time,” Indigenous producers and creators draw attention to ways that (a) White settlers are themselves well behind in their understanding of contemporary Indigenous social and political realities and (b) Indigenous peoples are active participants in narrating their own histories in relation to, yet distinct from White settler histories. We learn that Indigenous existence is a struggle against White settler hegemony and violence, an existence that would involve understandings of hard-work, independence, innovation, adaptability, and tolerance that look quite different than White settler iterations.
Without a doubt, these exhibits address and produce quite different subjects of commemoration. In fragmenting the purpose and contesting the histories at the basis of commemorative address, Indigenous resistance to celebratory commemorations reveal the space in which Indigenous peoples are “on time.”
Conclusion
The intersections between the Saskatchewan Centennial and the Québec 400 emerge in the midst of a twenty-first-century eruption of large-scale events celebrating the European settler project in Canada. The analysis of these two events is meant to contribute to the work of questioning the very basis of such celebrations. While the Saskatchewan and Québec commemorations are linked together partly through their coexistence as archived commemorative celebrations, we also brought them together to tease out potential lessons leading up to the Canada 150 celebrations in 2017.
It is striking how much the events in 2005 and 2008 resemble those described in Mackey’s analysis of the “Spirit of the Nation” spectacle in 1992 (for Canada 125). That play resembles Rencontres and the Centennial Gala in many important ways, including in its spectacularized representation of the encounter between White settlers and Indigenous peoples and in the marked temporal frameworks. Mackey (2002) argues that the performance’s narrative “combines a celebration of cultural diversity, a glorification of Canadian achievement and shaping of the environment, and a message of harmony with the land” (p. 74). Therefore, all three commemorative spectacles—spanning over a decade-and-a-half and taking place in three distinct regions of Canada—provide subjects with a story of White settler innocence that could very well lead to the depoliticization of contemporary Indigenous political, social, and/or territorial claims. They also diverge in one important way: instead of representing White settlers and Indigenous peoples as involved in the same endeavor, as “Spirit of the Nation” and the Saskatchewan Centennial do, Rencontres represents French settlers and Indigenous peoples as the same people: the Québécois. Whether or not the self-indigenization process on display during the Québec 400 emerges during the Canada 150—in Québec or otherwise—is certainly of scholarly and political relevance going forward.
This study’s most salient contribution is in presenting Indigenous forms of counter-commemoration to the celebratory mode of Saskatchewan and Québec commemoration. Given the high-profile Indigenous resistance to the Vancouver Olympics (Boykoff, 2011; O’Bonsawin, 2010), arguably the last, truly national event before the Canada 150, we anticipate similar forms of resistance to the events in 2017. Whatever this may resemble, our analysis demonstrates the different kinds of reconciliatory spaces imagined by White settler and by Indigenous subjects. As we have shown, these are spaces that emerge in and reflect radically different relations with the past. Our study seriously questions the possibility of reconciliation through any investments in celebrating the White settler colonial-national project. How could such celebratory investment possibly reconcile with the mourning of and resistance to the continued effects on Indigenous people brought on by the same project?
We think that it is time for White settlers, such as those hailed as subjects of commemoration in Québec and Saskatchewan, to find it within ourselves to postpone celebrations of our history and divert our considerable efforts to the persistent disparities in life chances between White settlers and Indigenous peoples. This would entail a radical recalibration of priorities in the nation-state, and among settlers—a recalibration that future peoples might some day rightly celebrate.